“People should not see me as an enemy, they should see me as a friend,” Mr Rastani, 34, told smh.com.au from his South London home today.

“I am happy to point them in the right direction, so they can learn how to actually profit from a market crash.” “Some people say that it is a negative that I don’t work for a financial institution – I think it is a positive. Financial institutions are making bankers unemployed right now. In this climate it is safer to be trading for yourself,” he said.

Why did people find it so hard to believe that Alessio Rastani was the real deal and not a hoaxer? He’s the trader, a real one, whose brutal candour in a BBC television interview revealed the utter disregard of financial markets for the well being of the broader economy and society. We shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. It was the economist J K Galbraith who wrote in his classic analysis of the Great Crash of 1929 that “The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.” Now we are living through the greatest economic crisis of modern times, rooted in the reckless behaviour of speculative finance, and the financial community is bitterly resisting virtually every proposal for reform.

Yet Rastani seemed to shock everyone, whether in the media, those generally friendly to finance, and even outspoken critics of the banks. Why? Perhaps, just because the unvarnished truth is such a rare visitor. ‘Goldman Sachs rules the world, speculators dream of economic and social collapse as opportunities to profiteer, and are simply bored by the prospect of imagining a better system (from which they believe they will profit less),’ we might have guessed all of this, but its quite different when somebody actually says it.